The Magic Mountain, an opinion
“A good film can survive a bad score, but a good score cannot save a bad film”1 is a paraphrased quote attributed to the great, late Ennio Morricone. But I think the spirit of it can apply to books as well: A good book can survive bad moments, but good moments cannot save a bad book. One such book is The Magic Mountain.
Written by Thomas Mann and first published in German in 1924, it had been lauded by one writer for The Guardian as “…simply one of the greatest novels ever written.”2 Art, however, is subjective, and I respectfully disagree. Although in fairness to Thomas Mann, my opinion has been colored by the experience I had with my copy.
The edition I read was an English translation published in 2019; an absolute tome of 764 pages digitally formatted into just one chapter, with paragraphs interrupted by entire page breaks. These breaks sometimes happened mid sentence, and made for a genuinely painful reading experience. Would I read this again with a properly compiled book? Not unless I learned German.
Setting aside the atrocious formatting, my lack of connection to this novel could be that in translating into English, Mann’s intended tone was lost. Some passages felt like clever, funny satire, but it was swallowed by the rest of the book, leading me to question if lines I found funny were intended so by the author.
And then there is just so much book.
Written in omniscient third person narrative, the story centers on the protagonist Hans Castorp and his experience visiting a cousin in a tuberculosis Sanitarium high in the Swiss Alps. This visit unexpectedly extends from weeks to seven years after he is diagnosed with the disease himself. We follow as he meets, befriends, and ultimately loses several people over this time.
Among the books I’ve read from the 1920s-1930s, this one is notably too long. Exacerbating the length is that Magic Mountain arguably lacks a defined plot. It’s not a typical story with actions or beats, but rather a slice of life purposely drifting over 760 pages. On day three of Hans Castorp’s visit, at just 96 pages into the book, warning bells started ringing in my head. One sentence of descriptive narration at the 30% mark had 62 words in it. Halving the manuscript wouldn’t affect the core story. Which brings me to the pacing.
The Magic Mountain has seven chapters total in it, over seven hundred pages long - and chapter five starts only on page 188. The length breakdown absolutely boggled my mind. Working through those first five chapters was quite a slog. Only after reaching chapters six and seven, which accounted for 25% of the book, did the story become more engaging.
Difficult to determine if characters were better or worse than the story’s structure. Most were forgettable, but a few grew on me as the story progressed. The main character had no agency; things just seemed to happen to him and he went with it. The narrative voice, exposition, and dialogue were confusing, making it difficult to understand characters, their history, or even who was speaking at any given time. All the characters seemed to have the same voice, so it was impossible to use that to orient in the scene.
As a woman reading it in 2023, there were large parts, particularly regarding the "love interest" our main character obsessed over, that made me deeply uncomfortable. While usually I can contextualize the stories in their timeframe, the sheer length of this work made that incredibly difficult. Reframing it as a horror novel halfway through, however, increased my engagement enough to finish it.
Ultimately, the writing reads as fictional non-fiction. Without traditional plot beats, it felt like reading a reference material. Or the diary of a fundamentally boring person who does one fascinating thing and then tries to tell others about it but cannot make it interesting. There were some genuinely enjoyable moments. Dirty (naughty) tea sets, interactions with characters, pauses of introspection. It’s unfortunate they were overshadowed by rambling pseudo philosophical word vomit narration, which read like the stream of consciousness of an opium addict.
If this were a rating review, I would give it 3/5, allowing for the atrocious formatting I suffered through. Maybe I could have had a better experience if I approached it as a study on first and third person narration from the start.
An interesting comparison work is Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh. While they cover two different subjects, both books are third person slice of life satire, were published and occur in roughly the same time period, and both end on the battlefields of World War I. Yet Vile Bodies told its story in less than 300 pages, and for me was infinitely more enjoyable.
Reference List
Reference: Alberge, Dalya (2015), Ennio Morricone: good film scores have been replaced by the bad and the ugly, available at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/03/ennio-morricone-good-film-scores-replaced-by-bad-and-ugly#:~:text=While%20good%20music%20cannot%20save,a%20good%20film%2C%20he%20said. (Accessed 24 February 2024)
In-Text citation: 1
Reference: Gooderham, WB (2011), Winter reads: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/14/winter-reads-thomas-mann-magic-mountain (Accessed: 24 February 2024)
In-Text citation: 2
